From March 20 to 22, 2021, the China Development High-Level Forum was held simultaneously online and offline at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing.
The U.S. has refused to abandon its strategic ambiguity regarding the direction of U.S.-China relations. After the humiliation of the Alaska meeting, Secretary of State Blinken made some harsh remarks but did not change the positioning of the competitive relationship; at the same time, the Biden administration reduced military spending by 2.5 percent. If all of the above information still leaves no room for the illusion that the U.S. will punish China, then the prominent political and academic bipartisanship of the 20 or so U.S. attendees at a recent conference in Beijing and the content of their speeches make the point very clear.
Highlights of this article.
The list of attendees at China’s highest-level economic conference
The U.S. “Panda-Huggers” Basically Reject Trump’s Trade War with China
U.S. “panda-embracing faction” tells Beijing in advance that cooperation is expected
China’s highest-ranking economic meeting, the United States went to which people?
According to the official Chinese list of foreign delegates to the China Development Forum 2021: Institutions and Scholars, the core of the panda-embracing faction, which began to form during the Clinton years and dominated U.S. policy toward China through the Bush and Obama eras, went to many of them this time.
The following are just some of the fairly high-profile figures: Henry Kissinger, President of the Kissinger Association; Lawrence H. Summers, former U.S. Secretary of State; Robert Rubin, Harvard University professor and former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury; Honorary Co-Chairman Michael J. Boskin, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury; Stanford University Professor and Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution; Peter Mandelson, former Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Stephen A. Orlins, President, National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Sten H. Vermund, former Acting Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, U.S. Department of State, and many others.
It is easier to understand how successful Beijing’s united front work has been than to list them all: the two former chairmen and current members of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers; six Nobel Prize winners in economics from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, and New York Universities; the pro-Democratic think tanks Brookings Institution, Peterson Institute for International Economics The president and former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, the president and former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Trade, the president of the Ford Foundation, and the editor-in-chief of The Economist all appeared.
These institutions and people have essentially been the dominant players in U.S. relations with China for the past 20 years.
It’s not even the appearance of these figures that’s the main thing, it’s what some of these key figures have said.
Basic denial of Trump’s trade war with China[i]
After the U.S.-China trade war kicked off in March 2018, the U.S. embrace of the panda faction went largely silent, and this was the first time such a concentration of them appeared at a high-level official Chinese meeting, where their statements, in terms of content, essentially repudiated Trump’s China policy.
Edmund Phelps, a professor at Columbia University and Nobel laureate in economics, spoke at the conference, saying, “Some Westerners complain about China’s current account surplus and about Chinese workers taking the jobs of American workers. The causes behind these appearances are complex and are naturally determined by market factors, not deliberate manipulation by the Chinese government. The economic and trade relationship between the U.S. and China is interdependent, and the argument that China is ‘taking advantage of the U.S.’ doesn’t make sense. …… If the intermediate products that are now produced by Chinese workers are transferred to the U.S. for production, due to the higher wage levels of U.S. workers The cost of production will rise significantly, resulting in higher product prices. Many products are produced in China because of the high efficiency of Chinese production, which is the result of natural market selection and is beneficial to all parties.”
Anyone familiar with Sino-US relations over the years knows that this is still using the “comparative cost theory” to bemoan China, because there are two main reasons to start a trade war between the US and China, one is the huge US trade deficit with China ($275.8 billion in 2017 and nearly $420 billion in 2018, accounting for more than 67 percent of the entire U.S. foreign trade deficit; more than 90 percent of China’s trade surplus comes from the United States), then-President Trump said several times, “We’ve rebuilt China over the last 25 years.”
China was outraged at the time, and the Global Times published an article questioning “The United States has rebuilt China? That’s a bit of a fantasy for a Chinese audience. It was a great relief for Beijing to have a famous American Nobel laureate in economics come to China’s defense.
The professor is right, of course, that products are produced in China as a result of natural market selection (comparative costs). But as an American economics professor, he fails to see the consequences of the industrial shift for American manufacturing: 5.7 million manufacturing jobs were lost in the United States between 2000 and 2010, reducing the U.S. manufacturing job base by nearly a third. These job losses and their causes have been well documented in the mass media and in academia. The increased unemployment and suicide rates in the Rust Belt and the desperation of local manufacturing workers, many of whom abandoned the Democratic Party they had supported for more than three decades in favor of Trump in 2016, are a direct result of the major displacement of the American political landscape.
New York University professor and Nobel laureate Michael Spencer praised “China’s 14th Five-Year Plan for its excellent planning on the supply and demand side, of which innovation is a central element. China’s ability to innovate over the past decade has been impressive, and there is no doubt that China is capable of innovation” – which, on the surface, sounds like a no-brainer, but if one understands the targeted U.S. crackdown on Chinese intellectual property theft in recent years and the more than 100 Chinese scientists, many of whom are participants in China’s Thousand Talents Program, it is not. However, if one understands the targeted crackdown on Chinese intellectual property theft in recent years and the more than 100 Chinese scientists, many of whom are participants in China’s Thousand Talents Program, one cannot take this statement so simply. As mentioned earlier, Trump started the U.S.-China trade war for two reasons, in addition to the huge trade deficit with China, which is the massive theft of U.S. intellectual property by China.
China’s theft of U.S. intellectual property is the result of a lack of innovation capacity, coupled with the high cost of innovation, and therefore the use of Chinese and scientists in the U.S., using their positions to steal intellectual property on a massive scale.
The 2019 U.S. 301 investigation report focuses on technology transfer and intellectual property protection. In the final revised version of the 301 Investigation Report released on November 20, 2019, the U.S. Trade Representative reviewed hundreds of reported transactions in the following technology-intensive industries: 1, aviation; 2, integrated circuits; 3, information technology; 4, biotechnology, 5, industrial machinery; 6, renewable energy; and 7, automobiles.
Conclusion: The evidence suggests that Chinese government policies and measures have had a significant impact on investment in each of the technology-intensive industries studied. At multiple levels of government – central, regional and local – the Chinese government has directed and facilitated the acquisition of U.S. companies and assets in these industries.
The report names dozens of Chinese companies. Tsinghua University, China Telecom, Jinhua Integration, and China Southern Airlines are all named and placed in considerable detail according to categories such as state-run, mixed military and civilian, and private. Tsinghua University is not an enterprise, and it was named because many of the people in China’s Thousand Talents Program, which brings in overseas scientific and technological talent, are special professors at Tsinghua.
The “Made in China 2025” issued by the Chinese State Council, which was highlighted in the report, was directly accused by the U.S. of being “China’s guide to stealing intellectual property in the U.S. Beijing is also well aware that “the greatest concern of the United States is not the trade deficit but the long-term competitiveness of the country,” but refuses to acknowledge that much of the intellectual property theft is state-sponsored and has only quietly made some adjustments, such as a notice issued by the General Office of the Chinese State Council in December 2019, stating that since the date of the new notice , the previously issued State Office issued (2016) No. 82 containing references to Made in China 2025 ceased to be implemented.
As an American economics professor, one should at least pay attention to the facts that this report talks about. But these professors seem to have opposed Trump’s policies to the extent that they are reckless with the facts and must oppose whatever Trump advocates. This kind of internationalism (the interests of other countries) is higher than one’s own, and can only occur in the U.S., where “making America great” is seen as a mistake by the left.
An early indication to Beijing that cooperation is possible
The group of think tanks and economics professors who traveled between the political worlds of China and the United States went to Beijing for another purpose, to give Beijing an early indication of their willingness to cooperate.
Before going, Biden’s first 1.9 trillion plan has been introduced, the second 2.3 trillion with the proposed 2 trillion plan to be launched in April has not yet been announced, how to release the goodwill of the U.S. side because the words and actions of the Chinese representatives in the Alaska talks make the U.S. side unable to show cooperation? This kind of person with official background is most appropriate to appear.
Michael Spencer, on the other hand, praised China’s infrastructure development, which is more importantly “merited in daily life”, such as investment in airports, ports, railways and other infrastructure, ignoring the fact that China has created a serious overcapacity in infrastructure and had to launch the “Belt and Road” project, which was originally to export excess capacity to the world. “The United States should learn from China and other developing countries in this regard and pay more attention to public sector investment.
Jason Furman, former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, simply announced the good news to China: “The United States has launched a huge fiscal stimulus, which means people will buy goods from China, Europe, and Japan. [ii]
It is important to note that the above meeting was highly publicized in China, but not reported at all in the U.S. mainstream media, for reasons that are easy to understand.
[i] “6 Nobel Laureates Gathered, What Did They Say? Sohu.com, 2021-03-22.
[ii] “Top Economists Predict U.S. Economy: Inflation Fears and Bigger Stimulus Package? , First Financial, 2021-03-20
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